Tag: lana

The image is a sign I made for Rusev when I went to a Smackdown in Phoenix last October. Sadly I forgot it in the trunk of my rental car, but at least I took a picture. It has been a wild month here at The Spectacle of Excess. I started this blog two years ago just so I could have a space to shoot my mouth off into the void about wrestling and Shakespeare and Roland Barthes and…

So Rusev and Lana broke up, apparently to complicate the narrative so WWE could extricate itself from the much too effective political satire it had created with Lana and her big pictures of Putin and Red Square. It was great, but it was a minefield, and both Lana and Rusev are too good to be allowed to hit a wall of controversy or wash out as corny and innocuous cultural stereotypes. Trust me, we don’t…

Based on my What Rusev is Saying post from months ago, Google sends me boatloads of traffic on the topic of Rusev, Lana, what they’re saying and what they’re up to. Recently I’ve had several search terms to the effect of why is rusev bulgarian again. It’s a real puzzler, isn’t it? Suddenly, after their break up, Rusev is waving the Bulgarian flag. So representing Russia was all because Lana is such a pretty girl?…

So if the “I Quit” match was as nonsensical as I think it was, the Rusev character has committed to its free-fall. This once determined and hard-working immigrant who treated his beautiful valet (girlfriend?) with dignity and respect is now a ranting, illogical, abusive asshole collapsing beneath his wild-eyed hubris. And why? It seems to me Rusev is being tanked because so many of us refused to boo him as a heel. Many of us…

UPDATE! I was totally wrong here! Somebody who speaks Bulgarian corrected me on Twitter, check it out: @AndreaGregovich when he screams “aaa predavam sa” this means i qiur — Mario (@bloodicha1) May 18, 2015 So thank you to Mario for setting me straight on the words that I struggled with (predavam sa), and I owe Lana an apology. But now the match seems even more hokey. This means Rusev forgot how to speak English, he…

Friends, I have discovered a subliminal message on Smackdown this week. Remember the email Rusev received from Vladimir Putin? I took a look at the Russian for my own nerdy purposes and compared it to Lana’s translation. Her translation of the email was more or less accurate except for one small phrase. And what a phrase it is! Here is the sentence in Russian: Как президент великой державы, Матери-России, я с гордостью хочу выразить вам…

I seem to have become a go-to internet source for the thing Rusev says at the beginning of his entrance music, and the posts I’ve written about Lana’s general linguistic curiosities get a fair number of hits as well. But it turns out I have neglected to translate for you, not-so-gentle readers, the thing Lana always says in Russian as she begins her promos. I was perusing the google search terms that have brought people…

After I tweeted my last post On Heels That Should Be Faces and Faces That Should Be Heels, Twitter user @StigsVegCousin asked me to explain how I would book a Cena/Rusev double turn — Cena to heel and Rusev to face — which I alluded to in my post. I appreciated the challenge because really I’m just a chick who shoots my mouth off over here, throwing out my literary ideas about wrestling to see…

“Русев удря Русев мачка!” Have you wondered what it is Rusev is saying at the beginning of his entrance music? It’s been driving me crazy because I couldn’t make it out. Then I finally saw it in one of his tweets and spent a little time with Google Translate. Rusev udrya Rusev machka! is Bulgarian. It’s hard to hear in his entrance: I always thought I heard budrya instead of udrya. Machka stumped me because…

It is a curious state of affairs and a reflection on the liminal nature of kayfabe that WWE feels it must apologize to the people of Russia about Big Show’s satirical disrespect to their flag on RAW this week. Recall that WWE readily apologized about Lana’s mention of the Malaysian Airlines plane in Eastern Ukraine, while Lana herself dismissed the kerfuffle about what she said as “blah, blah, blah… propaganda.” These apologies are calculated —…

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"In the ring, and even in the depths of their voluntary ignominy, wrestlers remain gods because they are, for a few moments, the key which opens Nature, the pure gesture which separates Good from Evil, and unveils the form of a Justice which is at last intelligible." -Roland Barthes